"Let no freedom be allowed to novelty, because it is not fitting that any addition should be made to antiquity. Let not the clear faith and belief of our forefathers be fouled by any muddy admixture."
-- Pope Sixtus III

Forget
the post-truth presidency, when it didn’t matter — or so the
Trump White House hoped — whether the president told the truth. In
retrospect, those seem like the good old days. We have now entered
even scarier territory, the pre-truth presidency: If an assertion
isn’t true, no worry. President Trump will find a way to make it
so, or at least claim it is.

In
The World According to Trump, the president makes a baseless
assertion — perhaps to distract from bad news, perhaps to vent,
perhaps simply to attract attention, the narcotic he craves in
ever-larger doses. Then Trump or his hapless aides scramble to
collect evidence, however sketchy, to back him up. Or, scarier still,
he relies on his Twitter-fueled, sycophant-enabled capacity to create
his own reality-distortion field.

Trump
gleefully elaborated on this approach in a revealing interview with
Time magazine’s Michael Scherer.

“Sweden.
I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a
massive riot, and death, and problems,” Trump said, referring to
his unfounded comment last month about “what’s happening last
night in Sweden.”

In
this way, Trump serves as a human Heisenberg principle, changing a
measurable phenomenon by observing it. If he is wrong, it is only a
matter of time until he becomes right, at least in his own head. As
he told Scherer, “I predicted a lot of things that took a little of
bit of time.”

So
it will be, Trump predicted, with his reiterated, if slightly revised
(“mostly they register wrong”) assertion that his popular-vote
loss was the result of 3 million or more undocumented people voting.
“Well I think I will be proved right about that too,” Trump said.
“We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more
than that,” he added.

Most
politicians recoil from controversy. Trump seems to be convinced that
controversy serves to amplify his message. The burden of added
scrutiny is outweighed, in this Trumpian calculus, by the benefit of
extra attention for whatever message he is peddling.

The
consequent irony is that a president who denounces serious reporting
and unwelcome facts — “Any negative polls are fake news,” Trump
tweeted last month — has no qualms about relying on the fakest of
news, either as unchecked fodder for a tweet or to back it up after
the fact.

Pressed
by Scherer about his campaign trail insinuation that Sen. Ted Cruz’s
father was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, Trump was
characteristically unrepentant: “Why do you say that I have to
apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper just like I quoted the
judge the other day.”

The
newspaper — that would be the National Enquirer. Enough said. The
judge — that would be Andrew Napolitano, the former New Jersey
Superior Court judge and Fox News commentator who claimed to have
three intelligence sources saying the British had helped President
Barack Obama spy on Trump, a claim that Fox News itself said it could
not confirm before yanking Napolitano off the air.

Scherer,
pressing gently: “But traditionally, people in your position in the
Oval Office have not said things unless they can verify they are
true.”

Trump:
“I’m not saying, I’m quoting, Michael, I’m quoting highly
respected people and sources from major television networks.” He’s
just quoting — this in the face of the statement by a British
intelligence agency that it was “utterly ridiculous” to suggest
it spied on Trump and testimony by National Security Agency Director
Michael S. Rogers that such an allegation “clearly frustrates a key
ally of ours.”

The
beginning of his term has featured controversial executive orders and
frequent conflicts with the media.

Yet
it is not simply that Trump refuses to accept reality, it is that he
bends it to his will. In this Trump tower of dreams, if he tweets it,
the truth — or some asserted version thereof -- will come.

For
example, in the hyper-partisan form of House Intelligence Committee
Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). Even as Trump was on the phone with
Scherer, Nunes was scurrying to the White House to announce that U.S.
intelligence agencies had gathered and shared information about Trump
and his transition team.

Trump
was wrong then, and nothing Nunes had to report about incidental
surveillance made him retroactively right. Claiming so may be good
enough for Trump and the pre-truth presidency he oversees. It should
not — it cannot — suffice for the rest of us.

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About Me

First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct.
"My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up.
What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.